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Smart Lights, Speakers, Thermostats, Cameras and Other IoT Devices Are Being Increasingly Used as a Means For Harassment, Monitoring, and Revenge (nytimes.com)
Smart home devices are supposed to bring convenience to people's lives, but increasingly, their unintended consequences are surfacing, and are being exploited to harass others, an investigation by The New York Times has found. [Editor's note: the link maybe paywalled; syndicated source.] From the report: In more than 30 interviews with The New York Times, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers and emergency responders described how the technology was becoming an alarming new tool. Abusers -- using apps on their smartphones, which are connected to the internet-enabled devices -- would remotely control everyday objects in the home, sometimes to watch and listen, other times to scare or show power. Even after a partner had left the home, the devices often stayed and continued to be used to intimidate and confuse.
For victims and emergency responders, the experiences were often aggravated by a lack of knowledge about how smart technology works, how much power the other person had over the devices, how to legally deal with the behavior and how to make it stop. "People have started to raise their hands in trainings and ask what to do about this," Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said of sessions she holds about technology and abuse. She said she was wary of discussing the misuse of emerging technologies because "we don't want to introduce the idea to the world, but now that it's become so prevalent, the cat's out of the bag."
For victims and emergency responders, the experiences were often aggravated by a lack of knowledge about how smart technology works, how much power the other person had over the devices, how to legally deal with the behavior and how to make it stop. "People have started to raise their hands in trainings and ask what to do about this," Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said of sessions she holds about technology and abuse. She said she was wary of discussing the misuse of emerging technologies because "we don't want to introduce the idea to the world, but now that it's become so prevalent, the cat's out of the bag."
The problem isn't the item or their network capability. These things would be fine if you were only able to access and control them over your LAN. The problem is some idiot thought it would be cool to be able to access them over the Internet. As a result the devices connect to some server on the Internet (no doubt allowing the manufacturer to collect marketing info), waiting for your smartphone app to contact the server and connect to the devices remotely.
The way they should work is they should never connect to the Internet, and should limit their network activity to your LAN. If you want to control them from outside your home, you should set up a VPN server on your router (many of them come with one built-in now), and use the VPN client on your phone to access your LAN from the Internet, giving you access to those devices.
Unfortunately, this is beyond the technical capabilities of the vast majority of users, and they don't want to learn how to do it, so we end up with these IoT devices which access the Internet directly. Same reason everyone sells their soul and shares their news and photos on Facebook, instead of setting up their own personal website/blog.
Funny thing is that dumb phones and hardwired phones are still better at being phones than many smartphones today. Also, the actually wired phones don't blast your noggin with microwave radiation.